"I know firsthand what a hydroelectric dam can do to the environment. As a tribal member growing up on the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe’s reservation, the Elwha River and its two hydroelectric dams were in my backyard. Before the dams, whose construction began in 1910, the river was rich with several species of fish, including steelhead trout, and all five species of Pacific salmon. My great-grandfather and tribal elder, Edward Sampson, shared stories with me of catching 100-pound Chinook salmon, then watching the salmon populations decline when the dams came. Salmon have always been culturally and spiritually important to my tribe. They are treated reverently, and celebrated with ceremonies after the first catch of each year.

The Elwha dams were built without fish ladders, gently sloping structures that connect waters on either side of the dam. These ladders are important for anadromous fish, meaning stream-born fish that live part of their lives in the ocean and later return to their natal streams to spawn. Salmons are anadromous, and carry with them marine-derived nutrients that are important to the entire Elwha watershed ecosystem. Salmon carcasses provide nutrients for other wildlife and fertilizer for riparian vegetation.

My work has strengthened my ties to my home.

Without fish ladders, the dams blocked access by salmon to 90 percent of their historic spawning grounds, halted the flow of marine-derived nutrients into the ecosystem, and dramatically reduced salmon populations. They also negated agreements in the tribe’s 1855 Point No Point Treaty, which stated that it would have permanent fishing rights on the Elwha River.

The history of the dam was tightly woven in the history of my own family. My grandfather worked for the company that ran the dams for his entire career, while my grandmother was an activist working to remove the dams and restore the salmon populations. Then, on Sept. 17, 2011, the largest dam removal and river restoration project in United States history was set into motion. Both dams were removed, and the Elwha River began to flow freely again for the first time in 100 years.

My realization of the role people have in ecosystem health, brought about in part by watching my tribe fight for the removal of the dams and the restoration of the salmon, inspired me to pursue a career working in natural resources. I decided to return to my home on the reservation to pursue a degree in environmental science at Western Washington University, after attending the University of Hawaii at Mānoa for two years and studying marine biology. I was hired as an intern for the tribe’s wildlife program in 2014. Four months into my internship, I was hired for a part-time position by the tribe’s wildlife program manager, Kim Sager-Fradkin, while maintaining a full-time student schedule. In addition to a Columbian black-tailed deer mortality study, this program gave me an opportunity to study Elwha river otters and to be a part of an Elwha River Restoration wildlife monitoring project.

I am particularly proud of my involvement in the three-year, collaborative study monitoring Elwha wildlife recolonization. The Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, the United States Geological Survey, the National Park Service, and Western Washington University were all involved. The study gave me the opportunity to survey beavers, songbirds, deer and elk, vegetation and large woody debris, and small mammal trapping surveys. The experiences I’ve had during this study observing wildlife interactions with the environment over time have reinforced my desire to further my education studying population ecology. Because of this, I will be starting graduate school at the University of Idaho with a newly-funded project to study cougar population size and structure on the Olympic Peninsula.

My work has strengthened my ties to my home. In the years since I’ve returned, I’ve become closer with my tribal and scientific communities, and have grown an even stronger appreciation for the Elwha River ecosystem. The river restoration has been a major success for the Klallam people, and proves the effectiveness of methods for ecosystem restoration that will hopefully be used as a model in other restoration efforts worldwide. And for me personally, the experience of working on this restoration project and seeing firsthand the regeneration of the former lakebeds and of the historic lands of my people has been incredibly reaffirming."]

"The Washington State Geological Survey is using LIDAR technology to study the geology of the land hidden under forested areas of the state. LIDAR is like radar, but instead of bouncing radio waves off of objects to detect their distances, you use lasers. When you shoot laser light at a forested area, most of it is reflected back by the trees. But some of it reaches the ground, so by measuring the light that’s reflected back from the lowest point, you get a very accurate map of the bare earth, sans nature. Using the LIDAR maps, they can study the course changes in rivers, landslides, volcanic lava flows, earthquake faults & fault zones, tsunami inundation zones, and glaciers.

The beautiful photo at the top is a LIDAR image of the Sauk River and all its current and former channels…the bluish tint makes it look like an x-ray, which it pretty much is. It also reminds me of the meander maps of the Mississippi River made by Harold Fisk for the US Army Corps of Engineers.

"A Native American, Pacific Northwest Coast story tells how once it was so dark here that the People sent Raven and Mink to bring back light. Artworks by Mare Blocker, Carl Chew, Ron Hilbert Coy, and J.T. Stewart located throughout the Kenneth S. Allen Library are parts of a contemporary retelling of this story. In this retelling, light symbolizes the Library's collected knowledge.

Raven Brings Light to this House of Stories is a project of the Washington State Arts Commission, Art in Public Places Program in partnership with the University of Washington. The title of the work can be found written along the southeast wall in the Ground Floor Lobby, Allen North. It is in Lushootseed and English. Lushootseed speaking people are the Native Americans ancestral to where Seattle is today.

…

The installation includes:

• Ravens and Crows
By the artist team. In the Lobby and throughout the Library.

• Table of Knowledge
A cedar table by Ron Hilbert Coy celebrating the passage of knowledge from one generation to the next. In the Lobby.

• Presentations from the International Symposium of Light
A book by the artists, printed and bound by Mare Blocker. In the Lobby on the Table of Knowledge.

• Broadsides
Poems by J.T. Stewart, printed by Mare Blocker. In the Lobby, and 2nd Floor Bridge between Allen North and South Wings.

"In the verdant wilderness of Olympic National Park lies a small red pebble covering one square inch of space atop a moss-covered log. Though easy to miss among the snarls of flourishing flora, this red pebble marks what some claim to be the quietest place in the United States.

One Square Inch of Silence, an independent research project created by the author and Emmy Award-winning acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton, aims to protect the space from human noise intrusions. The tiny quiet spot, accessible via a three-mile rainforest hike down the Hoh River Trail near Forks, was designated on April 22, 2005 (Earth Day) as a “noise control project” to ensure the decibel count at the square inch would never rise.

It’s supposed to be a place utterly devoid of ambient noises, such as the roar of an airplane or the shrill ring of a cellphone. But the area isn’t completely silent. It’s designed to highlight the difference between natural sounds—things like the soft trickle of rainwater or the buzzing hum of an insect—and human noise. Hempton launched this “sanctuary of silence” with the hope the place will allow people to listen to and connect with the sounds of nature. The absence of anthropogenic noise is also good for the wildlife, as human noise often negatively affects animals’ feeding, breeding, and nesting habits.

Ideally, One Square Inch of Silence acts as an epicenter for a phenomenon that will reverse the effects of noise pollution. By encouraging and spreading silence, it could potentially counteract the rippling consequences loud human noises have on the local environment.

So far, the whole endeavor has been effective for the Olympic National Park preservation movement. Hempton chose the spot because of the park’s preexisting dearth of roads and air traffic. It was a clever conservation tactic: by protecting the square inch from noise pollution, it becomes necessary to preserve the entire surrounding national park as well.

The square inch of silence is one of only 12 “quiet zones” remaining in the U.S., and its claim of being the country’s quietest place has been supported by the readings of decibel meters. However, its integrity is at risk. There’s no way to enforce absolute silence within the area. When an intrusion occurs, Hempton tracks down the offending party and sends them a recording of the soundscape they’ve interrupted with the hope they’ll voluntarily make an effort to reduce or reroute the source of the noise.

It is ironic that the one man-made noise heard at this site is made by a federal agency, illegally. Since 2012 the US Navy has been flying through the airspace above on training missions. Growler jets on electronic warfare simulations are often heard by visitors to the Hoh Rainforest, including the one inch of silence location. Despite protests by local and national activists and concerned citizens, the military continues their intrusive noise campaign."

"In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, populations of the fisher (Pekania pennanti)—a forest-dwelling member of the weasel and otter family—were in steep decline across much of its native range of northern North America. Both fur trapping and habitat loss from logging and urbanization took a heavy toll. However, once trapping bans and timber harvest restrictions were put in place, the species rebounded in many regions.

Unfortunately, that trend hasn’t carried over to the West Coast of the U.S., where an isolated population of fishers, known as the Pacific fisher, continues to struggle. Scientists estimate that only 4,000 Pacific fishers remain, with just 300 left in California’s Sierra Nevada Range. These individuals now face a new and rising threat: illegal marijuana grow sites that are cropping up on public lands. Growers use poisons to protect their plants from rodents, and these chemicals are indiscriminate killers.

Despite the Pacific fisher’s high vulnerability to extinction, this little-known mammal has yet to receive federal protection under the Endangered Species Act. In the absence of this type of government regulation, an uneasy collaboration among scientists, conservation organizations, and the timber industry has filled in to take its place. For now, these efforts offer hope for the Pacific fisher—but without endangered species status, there are no assurances that current protections will continue into the future."

"More than two decades ago, two respected researchers, clinical physician Dr. Vincent Felitti and CDC epidemiologist Robert Anda, published the game-changing Adverse Childhood Experiences Study. It revealed a troubling but irrefutable phenomenon: the more traumatic experiences the respondents had as children (such as physical and emotional abuse and neglect), the more likely they were to develop health problems later in life—problems such as cancer, heart disease, and high blood pressure. To complicate matters, there was also a troubling correlation between adverse childhood experiences and prevalence of drug and alcohol abuse, unprotected sex, and poor diet. Combined, the results of the study painted a staggering portrait of the price our children are paying for growing up in unsafe environments, all the while adding fuel to the fire of some of society’s greatest challenges.

However, this very same study contains the seed of hope: all of the above-mentioned risk factors—behavioral as well as physiological—can be offset by the presence of one dependable and caring adult. It doesn’t need to be the mother or the father. It doesn’t even need to be a close or distant relative.

More often than not, that stable, caring adult is a teacher.

It is here, at the crossroads of at-risk teens and trauma-informed care, that Paper Tigers takes root. Set within and around the campus of Lincoln Alternative High School in the rural community of Walla Walla, Washington, Paper Tigers asks the following questions: What does it mean to be a trauma-informed school? And how do you educate teens whose childhood experiences have left them with a brain and body ill-suited to learn?

In search of clear and honest answers, Paper Tigers hinges on a remarkable collaboration between subject and filmmaker. Armed with their own cameras and their own voices, the teens of Paper Tigers offer raw but valuable insight into the hearts and minds of teens pushing back against the specter of a hard childhood.

Against the harsh reality of truancy, poor grades, emotional pain, and physical violence, answers begin to emerge. The answers do not come easily. Nor can one simply deduce a one-size-fits-all solution to a trauma-informed education. But there is no denying something both subtle and powerful at work between teacher and student alike: the quiet persistence of love.

"Whether at our 255-acre outdoor learning center, or any of our off-site locations, IslandWood invites children and adults alike to discover a new way of seeing nature, themselves, and one another. In doing so, each person comes to understand their ability to change the world for the better."

"Casting a large interdisciplinary research net has helped Simon Fraser University archaeologist Dana Lepofsky and 10 collaborators dig deeper into their findings about ancient clam gardens in the Pacific Northwest to formulate new perspectives.

Lepofsky’s research team has discovered that Northwest Coast Indigenous people didn’t make their living just by gathering the natural ocean’s bounty. Rather, from Alaska to Washington, they were farmers who cultivated productive clam gardens to ensure abundant and sustainable clam harvests.

In its new paper published by American Antiquity, Lepofsky’s team describes how it isolated novel ways to date the stone terraces that created clam beaches. These beaches are certainly more than 1,000 years old and likely many thousands of years older. The researchers identified many places where people built gardens on bedrock — creating ideal clam habitats where there were none before. This, the researchers concluded, clearly challenges the notion that First Nations were living in wild, untended environments.

“We think that many Indigenous peoples worldwide had some kind of sophisticated marine management, but the Pacific Northwest is likely one of the few places in the world where this can be documented,” says Lepofsky. “This is because our foreshores are more intact than elsewhere and we can work closely with Indigenous knowledge holders.”

The researchers, who worked with First Nations linguistic data, oral traditions and memories, geomorphological surveys, archaeological techniques and ecological experiments, belong to the Clam Garden Network. It’s a coastal group interested in ancient clam management.

“Understanding ancient marine management is relevant to many current issues,” says Lepofsky.

Her team is comparing clam garden productivity to that of modern aquaculture and assessing whether the shell-rich beaches of clam gardens help buffer against increasing ocean acidification. The team will also build experimental clam gardens, applying many of the traditional cultivation techniques learned from First Nations collaborators as a means of increasing food production and food security today.

This latest study is on the heels of one done a year ago by Lepofsky and her collaborators. The original three-year study published in PLOS ONE found that these ancient gardens produced quadruple the number of butter clams and twice the number of littleneck clams as unmodified clam beaches. It was the first study to provide empirical evidence of the productivity of ancient Pacific Northwest clam gardens and their capacity to increase food production.

The Tula Foundation, Parks Canada, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and Wenner Gren, among other groups, are funding the team’s studies.

Key highlights of new study:

• Northwest Coast Indigenous peoples from Alaska to Washington State managed clam beaches in a variety of ways. These included replanting of small clams and building rock terrace walls at the low-low tide line to create clam gardens.

• Northwest Coast First Nations language terms indicate clam gardens were built in specific places by rolling the rocks for two purposes. One was to create rock-walled terraces ideal for clam growth. Another was to clear the beaches of unwanted rubble that would limit clam habitat.

• The researchers developed novel ways to date the clam gardens and their preliminary excavations revealed that many date to more than 1,000 years ago.

• Working on these clam gardens posed some logistical challenges since many are only visible for about 72 daylight hours per year.

• Extensive air and ground surveys revealed that clam gardens can be found from Alaska to Washington State, but in some places, such as the Gulf Islands, recent rising sea level obscures the rock walls. In some areas, clam gardens made possible the dense ancient First Nations settlements that dot our coastline.

As Canada's engaged university, SFU is defined by its dynamic integration of innovative education, cutting-edge research and far-reaching community engagement. SFU was founded almost 50 years ago with a mission to be a different kind of university—to bring an interdisciplinary approach to learning, embrace bold initiatives, and engage with communities near and far. Today, SFU is a leader amongst Canada's comprehensive research universities and is ranked one of the top universities in the world under 50 years of age. With campuses in British Columbia's three largest cities—Vancouver, Surrey and Burnaby—SFU has eight faculties, delivers almost 150 programs to over 30,000 students, and boasts more than 130,000 alumni in 130 countries around the world."

"Washington’s Integrated Basic Education and Skills Training Program (I-BEST) is a nationally recognized model that quickly boosts students’ literacy and work skills so that students can earn credentials, get living wage jobs, and put their talents to work for employers.

I-BEST pairs two instructors in the classroom – one to teach professional/technical or academic content and the other to teach basic skills in reading, math, writing or English language – so students can move through school and into jobs faster. As students progress through the program, they learn basic skills in real-world scenarios offered by the college and career part of the curriculum.

I-BEST challenges the traditional notion that students must complete all basic education before they can even start on a college or career pathway. This approach often discourages students because it takes more time, and the stand-alone basic skills classes do not qualify for college credit. I-BEST students start earning college credits immediately."

"The largest city in Finland is experimenting with getting rid of school subjects. This would mean doing away with lessons in history, math, and science in favor of teaching broader themes, where teachers work together on lessons in a given topic.

The goal is to help students in Helsinki better understand how their classwork relates to real life, and to give teachers the opportunity to work together to plan lessons. And the change, which for now has really only taken hold in one city, is likely to contribute to the idea of Finland as an education paradise, with plentiful playtime, few standardized tests, no requirement that students learn cursive, and, maybe one day, no formal subjects at all.

Next year, a new framework for Finnish education will direct schools across the country to experiment with this model at least occasionally. Because Finland has a reputation for excellent performance on international tests — although that reputation has slipped somewhat recently — the change will be closely watched. So far, though, Finland isn't throwing out the traditional approach to education entirely. Not yet.

How the new Helsinki approach to education works

Finland began experimenting with topic-based lessons in the 1970s, says Pasi Sahlberg, an expert on Finnish education and a visiting professor of practice at Harvard.

Helsinki has embraced topics instead of subjects recently, requiring schools to experiment at least twice a year with this approach to education. Beginning next year, all schools in Finland will be required to try it at least once.

At some Helsinki schools, students on the academic track are studying the European Union, combining history, geography, economics, and languages; on the vocational track, they're studying "cafeteria services," including math and communication skills, according to the Independent (UK).

This is an idea borrowed from the US: it comes from the theories of education philosopher John Dewey, who wanted to educate the "whole child," and has gone in and out of style in American schools. A vocationally oriented version of this approach has caught on recently for adults at community colleges in Washington state, where some programs instruct students in job skills and academic subjects at the same time.

How Finland is overhauling its schools

Finland's education system is internationally renowned. But the nation is in the middle of a broad overhaul of its framework for education: loose guidelines for schools and districts on what students should learn. The changes are meant to ensure the school system is in step with what the nation will need in the future, and to emphasize students working together and "the joy of learning," according to Finland's national board of education.

The main goal of the new approach is to address a concern Finns have about their education system: that it doesn't do enough to encourage curiosity and make learning relevant in the real world, Sahlberg said.

Compared with the OECD average, students in Finland are more likely to be late for school, more likely to say they give up easily when confronted with a difficult problem, and less likely to say they do more than what is expected of them. (Students in the US are also more likely to say they remain interested in their work once they've started it than Finnish students are, and are more likely to say they exceed expectations.)

"Finland has been working a long time already to try to find ways to engage young people more into their own learning and to make schoolwork more meaningful and interesting," Sahlberg said.

But Finland will still have national expectations for what students learn. In other words, even if some schools eliminate math and language classes for part or even all of the year, students will still be expected to master those subjects."

"In the past two years, all of these things have happened at Seattle’s long-languishing South End school, and all trace back to the moment when Rainier Beach gambled on a rigorous curriculum with a fancy name and high-end pedigree: the International Baccalaureate.

Outsiders have been dismissive from the start. Rainier Beach kids, many of whom entered high school performing below grade level, would never succeed on the college track, they said. The school was an incubator for star athletes, not serious scholars.

But early results are crushing those predictions as soundly as a slam dunk.

No marker is more stunning than Beach’s 25-point increase in graduation rates since 2011. Last spring, 79 percent of seniors left with a diploma — better than the 74 percent district average.

Parents, once so wary of Beach’s reputation for gangs and lackluster academics that they were willing to pay for private school or drive 20 miles north for advanced classes, are beginning to reconsider. Projected enrollment next fall at Rainier Beach is higher than it has been in a decade."

"Lots of people love the birds in their garden, but it's rare for that affection to be reciprocated. One young girl in Seattle is luckier than most. She feeds the crows in her garden - and they bring her gifts in return."

"Welcome to One Square Inch
A SANCTUARY FOR SILENCE AT OLYMPIC NATIONAL PARK

“SILENCE IS NOT THE ABSENCE OF SOMETHING,
BUT THE PRESENCE OF EVERYTHING.”

-Gordon Hempton, Founder
One Square Inch of Silence

One Square Inch of Silence is very possibly the quietest place in the United States. It is an independent research project located in the Hoh Rain Forest of Olympic National Park, which is one of the most pristine, untouched, and ecologically diverse environments in the United States. If nothing is done to preserve and protect this quiet place from human noise intrusions, natural quiet may be non-existent in our world in the next 10 years. Silence is a part of our human nature, which can no longer be heard by most people. Close your eyes and listen for only a few seconds to the world you live in, and you will hear this lack of true quiet, of silence. Refrigerators, air conditioning systems, and airplanes are a few of the things that have become part of the ambient sound and prevent us from listening to the natural sounds of our environment. It is our birthright to listen, quietly and undisturbed, to the natural environment and take whatever meanings we may from it. By listening to natural silence, we feel connected to the land, to our evolutionary past, and to ourselves. One Square Inch of Silence is in danger, unprotected by policies of the National Park Service, or supported by adequate laws. Our hope is that by listening to natural silence, it will help people to become true listeners to their environment, and help us protect one of the most important and endangered resources on the planet, silence."

"JOHN GUSSMAN — the Sequim-based cinematographer who has been documenting the $325 million Elwha River restoration/dam removal project — has shared a new 2-minute video — below, https://vimeo.com/119029319 — taken Friday of the Elwha.

The river, now free of its two dams and swollen by heavy rains, roars through Olympic National Park west of Port Angeles."

"Scientists have been looking at all angles of the Elwha River since deconstruction began on two dams just over a year ago. They’ve been testing turbidity, tracking river otters and conducting an ongoing salmon census.

And now they’re using remote-control planes to record high-definition video and thermal images. They’re securing a small camera to a 4-foot wide drone, which can flies as high as 500 feet over the river.

Last week researchers with the U.S. Geological Survey stood on the banks of Lake Mills, which was formed by the 210-foot Glines Canyon dam, and launched the camera-toting drone called a Raven. It flew for about 30 minutes over the exposed reservoir showing the vast fields of sediment that have built up behind the dam over the last 85 years.

Watch this video to see highlights from the drone’s most recent flight:

By studying every inch of the Elwha, scientists hope to answer big questions about dam removal: What happens to the fish? What happens to the massive reserves of sediment? And what happens to the barren, unvegetated areas of the emptied reservoirs?

The drone video research of the Elwha is a collaboration between the U.S. Geological Survey, the Bureau of Reclamation and the National Park Service."

"In 1992 landmark federal legislation called for the removal of two dams from the Elwha River to restore salmon runs. Jeff Crane dives into the debate over development and ecological preservation in Finding the River, presenting a long-term environmental and human history of the river as well as a unique look at river reconstruction.

Finding the River examines the ways that different communities--from the Lower Elwha Klallam Indians to current-day residents--have used the river and its resources, giving close attention to the harnessing of the Elwha for hydroelectric production and the resulting decline of its fisheries. Jeff Crane describes efforts begun in the 1980s to remove the dams and restore the salmon. He explores the rise of a river restoration movement in the late twentieth century and the roles that free-flowing rivers could play in preserving salmon as global warming presents another set of threats to these endangered fish.

A significant and timely contribution to American Western and environmental history--removal of the two Elwha River dams is scheduled to begin in September 2011--Finding the River will be of interest to historians, to environmentalists, and to fisheries biologists, as well as to general readers interested in the Puget Sound and Olympic Peninsula and environmental issues"

"There is a peculiar appeal to situations like this, landscapes that are being redrawn or thrust into an entirely different trajectory. It could be anything from a volcanic eruption to a twinkling New Urbanist development. It’s the effort of transformation itself – its process – that is intriguing. This brings to mind Bruno Latour’s critique of both “nature” and of the “social” as existing a priori, as taken-for-granted given substances of sorts. Rather, he contends, both are constantly being negotiated, remade or forcefully sustained by a shifting multitude of participants, human and non. And further, the distinction between these two collectives doesn’t hold up under scrutiny, as we can see in the former reservoir of Condit Dam.

One of the most useful aspects of actor-network-theory (I think) is its investigative emphasis on change and transition. During such times, we get a better glimpse of what the social is composed of, its peculiar ‘web of associations’ [iii]. When situations drastically change or things quite functioning nature as given substance evaporates and we are better able to see the diverse and dynamic multitude arduously creating it."

""Return of the River" offers a story of hope and possibility amid grim environmental news. It is a film for our time: an invitation to consider crazy ideas that could transform the world for the better. It features an unlikely success story for environmental and cultural restoration.

Fundamentally, the Elwha River in Washington State is a story about people and the land they inhabit. The film captures the tenacity of individuals who would not give up on a river, mirroring the tenacity of salmon headed upstream to spawn. It is a narrative with global ramifications, exploring the complex relationship between communities and the environment that sustains them.

The camera soars over mountain headwaters, dives into schools of salmon, and captures turbines grinding to a halt; as the largest dam removal project in history begins. The film features people and perspectives on all sides of the Elwha debate, reflecting the many voices of the Elwha valley."

"Remember that time in the 1960s when the Canadians accidentally launched exploding shells into an American town? Few people do. It's just one of those embarrassing Cold War flubs that both countries would rather forget.

On January 29, 1962 the Canadian Navy destroyer HMCS Skeena was conducting target practice off the coast of Washington state and British Columbia. They were firing at drone targets that were being pulled by Canadian Air Force planes. Unfortunately, they didn't stop to think about where the shells that missed their target might land. The answer turned out to be a small American fishing town.

The residents of Clallam Bay, Washington were understandably alarmed when the bombs and shrapnel started falling around 3:20 PM on that Monday afternoon. Most of the shells exploded in the air, causing shrapnel to shower the residents for about 20 agonizing minutes. But at least three "duds" fell on the American town as well. One of these duds even landed in a school playground while classes were being dismissed.

"One piece of shell fell near a boy who was just returning home," the Associated Press reported. Other pieces of shells landed on rooftops and near elderly people just trying to do some leisurely gardening.

"I didn't know what was happening," said one resident who was outside when fragments of bombshell started pouring down on her house. "I thought they were shooting out on the street."

The U.S. Navy swept in and grabbed the unexploded shells. Thankfully nobody was hurt. Or if they were, the media didn't report on it. The real scandal here might be that the Canadians were such a bad shot.

The people of the town just had to chalk it up as the cost of fighting the Cold War. But they were obviously still concerned about bombs landing in their town, even if they were coming from the Canucks rather than the Ruskies. A mortar bomb, it would seem, is a mortar bomb — no matter who's doing the launching.

"People are pretty mad," the sheriff of the town told the Associated Press at the time. "The shells landed right in Clallum Bay."

The Royal Canadian Navy and the US Navy both ordered investigations into the incident. The captain of the HMCS Skeena, Richard H. Leir, was courtmartialed and convicted over the incident. However, it appears Leir continued to remain a senior officer.

Below, a clipping from the January 31, 1962 Port Angeles Evening News:"

"Earlier in the trip we had gone to the Jamestown S’Klallam carving shed and wondered at the size of logs that were waiting to be carved into totem poles- huge logs, 700 or 800 years old, the woodcarver had said, but they were only half as big around as this stump.

We can free the Elwha and its salmon, but we can’t know what it would have looked like if we had never dammed it. And we’ll never have that tree back, and in a hundred years, there may well be tame elk and black bears at the Olympic Game Farm, or a population of feral yaks on the Olympic Peninsula."

"Archives are the corporate memory of the institution. Included are the business and operational records of the College that are no longer actively in use in offices throughout the institution :

The materials available in Archives must also be either of continuing administrative, legal, or historical importance.
Archives provide institutional researchers with documentation on:

• past policy, procedures, and documentation of official activities on behalf of the college.

• activities of administrators, staff , faculty - includes personal papers of retired or deceased administrators, faculty, and staff who have been part of the Evergreen Community.

• academic and leisure education programs - includes program histories.

• student academic work and student organizatons - includes examples of individual and student group academic work and the corporate records of campus student organizations.

Note: The search function has been removed from this page until it can be upgraded. Changes to the coding have made the search function inoperable. Please use the search box on the main TESC web page. It should provide links to Archival materials held in this repository."

The Evergreen State College is often noted for what it isn't, perhaps most famously by the "Four Nos" first articulated over 40 years ago by founding president Charlie McCann. Before Evergreen opened its doors, direction for the new college was as much about what it shouldn't be as what it should. State Senator Gordon Sandison said the Legislature did not want "just another four year college" bound by rigid structures of tradition. Governor Dan Evans expressed the need to "unshackle our educational thinking from traditional patterns" to create a "flexible and sophisticated educated instrument."

Knowing what you aren't can be immensely freeing, but it doesn't tell a fuller story of what you are. The documents listed below are some of the college's primary texts and key secondary sources. We hope they shed light on how Evergreen became the college it did and how it continues to define and redefine itself.

If you don't see something that you think should be here, contact John McLain, ext. 6045. To learn more about Evergreen's history, visit the Archives in Library 0426 or contact Archivist Randy Stilson, ext. 6126."

"Alaskans, stay in Alaska. People in the Midwest and the Pacific Northwest, sit tight.

Scientists trying to predict the consequences of climate change say that they see few havens from the storms, floods and droughts that are sure to intensify over the coming decades. But some regions, they add, will fare much better than others.

Forget most of California and the Southwest (drought, wildfires). Ditto for much of the East Coast and Southeast (heat waves, hurricanes, rising sea levels). Washington, D.C., for example, may well be a flood zone by 2100, according to an estimate released last week.

Instead, consider Anchorage. Or even, perhaps, Detroit.

“If you do not like it hot and do not want to be hit by a hurricane, the options of where to go are very limited,” said Camilo Mora, a geography professor at the University of Hawaii and lead author of a paper published in Nature last year predicting that unprecedented high temperatures will become the norm worldwide by 2047.

“The best place really is Alaska,” he added. “Alaska is going to be the next Florida by the end of the century.”

Under any model of climate change, scientists say, most of the country will look and feel drastically different in 2050, 2100 and beyond, even as cities and states try to adapt and plan ahead. The northern Great Plains states may well be pleasant (if muggy) for future generations, as may many neighboring states. Although few people today are moving long distances to strategize for climate change, some are at least pondering the question of where they would go.

“The answer is the Pacific Northwest, and probably especially west of the Cascades,” said Ben Strauss, vice president for climate impacts and director of the program on sea level rise at Climate Central, a research collaboration of scientists and journalists. “Actually, the strip of coastal land running from Canada down to the Bay Area is probably the best,” he added. “You see a lot less extreme heat; it’s the one place in the West where there’s no real expectation of major water stress, and while sea level will rise there as everywhere, the land rises steeply out of the ocean, so it’s a relatively small factor.”

Clifford E. Mass, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Washington, writes a popular weather blog in which he predicts that the Pacific Northwest will be “a potential climate refuge” as global warming progresses. A Seattle resident, he foresees that “climate change migrants” will start heading to his city and to Portland, Ore., and surrounding areas.

“The Pacific Ocean is like our natural air conditioning,” Professor Mass said in a telephone interview. “We don’t get humidity like the East Coast does.”

As for the water supply? “Water is important, and we will have it,” Professor Mass declared. “All in all, it’s a pretty benign situation for us — in fact, warming up just a little bit might be a little bit welcome around here.”

Already, he said, Washington State is gearing up to become the next Napa Valley as California’s wine country heats up and dries out.

“People are going crazy putting in vineyards in eastern Washington right now,” he said.

There may be other refuges to the east. Don’t count out the elevated inland cities in the country’s midsection, like Minneapolis, Salt Lake City, Milwaukee and Detroit, said Matthew E. Kahn, a professor of environmental economics at the University of California, Los Angeles.

“I predict we’re going to have millions of people moving to those areas,” he said in a telephone interview.

In his 2010 book “Climatopolis,” Professor Kahn predicts that when things get bad enough in any given location — not just the temperatures and extreme weather, but also the cost of insurance and so forth — people will become “environmental refugees,” fleeing cities like Phoenix, Los Angeles and San Diego. By 2100, he writes, Detroit will be one of the nation’s most desirable cities."

"It’s raining in Seattle today and tomorrow. This should come as no surprise to those who know the reputation of this part of the world. But in fact, this rain is special. It’s the first storm of the year; a harbinger for a change of season that strikes at the core of how it feels to live in the Pacific Northwest.

You see, this time of year, I want it to rain for days. I want an atmospheric river to roll off the Pacific and slam Seattle with precipitation. I want to look at the weather map and see greens, yellows and oranges. Thankfully, I live in a place that makes the timely arrival of rain an absolute certainty.

It’s not simply the arrival or rain, but the transition to a different environment and way of life. The drear has a certain dark beauty; a low-contrast softness. There’s no need to squint or close the blinds. Even the sound of the rain on our house is music to my ears, a lullaby.

In this feeling, I am not alone:"

…

"The long, dark Seattle winters do something to me. They make me forget what it’s like when the days are long and warm. The bare trees make it hard to imagine the lush Seattle spring.

And then, just as it becomes too dark for too long, the promise of a sun-kissed rendezvous returns and the great maximization begins again — along with the pressure. It’s a cycle I’ve come to love.

I do look forward to the sun, but it ends just in time, because in my heart, I also love the rain."

"Last month, I was in San Francisco for a few days. Being in California, if you’re from the East Coast, just feels different, in a way that I've never satisfactorily articulated to myself, but then I find myself whooping when I first spot the Pacific Ocean as I cross the peninsula from SFO to Highway 1.

Part of it is a lifetime of living with the mythos of California. Quoting Charlie Loyd: "…California, America’s America: beautiful, dysfunctional, dominant, infuriatingly calm about itself, vastly more diverse and complex than even the best informed and most charitable outsider gives it credit for, built on bones, overflowing with demagogues, decadent, permanently reinventing itself."

But part of my experience of San Francisco, and Seattle and Vancouver, is that the underlying land shapes the city, rather than the city shaping the land. This is literally the case in Boston and New York, where the edges of the city defined by landfill, so all you are aware of in the city is the city. In San Francisco, the bones of the land are apparent in every direction you look, hills rising and falling and beyond them, the sea. The original grid of San Francisco was laid out for the dozen or so blocks of the settlement of Yerba Buena, and then as the city grew and grew the grid was just extended in all directions, heedless of the underlying topography—so today, the topography defines the paths through the city. Every San Franciscan I know thinks about the city in three dimensions—which routes to one’s destination involve the least climbing, the Wiggle, where the beautiful views are.

I miss Toronto, my hometown. I miss its unparalleled diversity. I know it’s not what was when I was growing up there, but I miss living in a place with a determined commitment to collectively making the lives of its residents better. When I was there in June, I found myself driving in an unfamiliar part of the city. The wide road was lined with modest but pleasant single-family homes, and every few blocks there was a small park and a school. Peace, order and good government. What I don’t miss from Toronto is the physical geography—the city sits on the fertile lowland between two rivers and, besides being on Lake Ontario, has virtually none to speak of. When I trained for a marathon in grad school, I would head due north up a major street for mile after mile, the road gently sloping upwards as I went away from the lake, which meant a gentle downhill as I returned home. That’s basically it. The city is defined by the city.

In contrast, when I miss Seattle, I miss the landscape. I miss seeing the Cascades and the Olympics on clear days, and I miss coming over a hill and seeing Puget Sound. But above all, I miss Mount Rainier. I still remember the first time I saw the mountain. I vaguely knew that you could see Rainier from the city, but I was completely unprepared when I turned a corner and saw this giant stratovolcano just looming. My relationship with the person I was in Seattle to see ended not long after, but I have yet to fall out of love with Rainier. Years later, I moved to Seattle to do a sabbatical at the University of Washington, which has a long quadrangle, the Rainier Vista, aligned with the mountain. For a year I walked past it every morning and evening, pausing on the days I could see the peak. Almost the last thing I did before returning to the quietly rolling New England landscape was to get a tattoo of Rainier on my ankle. The lock screen of my phone is a photo of the peak I took from a mountain meadow within the park.

Some Japanese immigrants to the area have called Rainier 'Tacoma Fuji', but Mount Fuji is known for its symmetrical cone, and part of the beauty of Rainier to me is its distinct asymmetry—the prominences on its flanks would qualify as mountains in their own right. I don’t suffer from Stendhal Syndrome in its traditional form, but there are a few places in the world where I have to work hard not to be physically overcome by beauty. One is the Marin Headlands, and the view over the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco. Another is the east coast of Vancouver Island, looking over the Strait of Georgia towards Vancouver. And one is still pretty much every time I see Rainier. The beauty of San Francisco and of Cascadia is a wild beauty, the juxtaposition of human habitation and landscape, but one where the landscape holds its own. I was in Switzerland a few years ago, near Lausanne, and I've never been in a place that looked more like the tourist conception of the place. The mountains were high, sure, but the green velvet of pasture was spread high on their slopes, dotted with placid brown cows. The net result was one of pastoral domesticity, where the mountains were tamed. It was pretty, but it wasn't beautiful. The West Coast is beautiful.

But even before I set eyes on Rainier for the first time, I knew that it was dangerous. The primary risk isn't from a Mount St Helens-style eruption, but rather from lahars, the mudslides that would result when the heat from the eruption melts the glaciation on the peak. A hundred and fifty thousand people live nearby, in what appear to be gentle flat-bottomed river valleys but which are actually the paths of previous lahars. In 1985, twenty thousand people, including two-thirds of the population of Armero, Colombia, were killed by lahars resulting from the eruption of the Nevada del Ruiz volcano. Partly as a result of that tragedy, Rainier is the most instrumented mountain in the world, providing about forty minutes of warning to the nearest community, and schoolchildren there do volcano drills, fleets of school buses waiting to rush them out of the danger zone. The best estimates are that there’s a one-in-ten chance of lahar flows that make it as far as the Puget Sound lowlands within a human lifetime. And a repeat of the massive Osceola Mudflow, five thousand years ago, would send glacial mud as far as downtown Seattle, and cause tsunamis in the Sound and in Lake Washington.

The wildest of wild West Coast beauty: that Mount Rainier, the greatest physical threat to Seattle, is celebrated and beloved."

"Just as national parks have become a crucial part of American culture, so has the art inspired by these special places.

The jagged mountains of the North Cascades divide the park into a wet west and a dry east: Skagit and Stehekin. Their landscapes vary in natural features, remoteness, and park community but, for the past decade, both have welcomed and inspired visiting artists.

Whether you're an interested artist or just interested in the arts, learn more about:

"Art in Stehekin
The Stehekin community is in a small, remote valley in the Lake Chelan National Recreation Area, part of North Cascades National Park Complex. This narrow valley lies in rugged mountains east of the Cascade crest. You can't drive to Stehekin. Travel is by foot, floatplane or passenger boat.

The Stehekin valley has 13 miles of interior road leading to North Cascades National Park, and three wilderness areas. It is home to a rich variety of wildlife and 95 year-round human residents. Stehekin's landscape is animated by a restless river and forests where fire is restoring the diversity of plant and animal communities. Stehekin's history can be experienced in century old buildings at the Buckner Orchard and the one room log school house built in the 1920s. The Stehekin valley has been an inspiration to artists for centuries beginning with the unknown painters of our pictographs.

Stehekin's isolation will not be comfortable for everyone. Services are limited: one small and very limited convenience store, a post office, a summer season bakery, one public phone, limited internet access, and no cell phone service. All groceries and supplies must be brought in or ordered from the town of Chelan or via mail order.

Learn more about Stehekin here.

Proposals
Residency is envisioned as a partnership. Artists present a minimum of two public programs. These can be workshops, talks, or other educational presentations.

Please submit all proposals and documentation with the Stehekin Artist-in-Residence application.

Potential proposals should consider one or more of the following:
1) Landscape and the geological forces that continue to shape it
2) Surrounding wilderness
3) Varied and abundant populations of plants and animals
4) Human history and its stories
5) Role of natural processes including fire and flood in our seasonal dramas
Deadlines:
Spring - January 15
Fall - June 15

"Nestled in a narrow valley at the remote north end of Lake Chelan, Wash., there's a tiny town that can only be reached by boat, float plane, or a hike over the North Cascade mountains. Now it will stay that way.

For nearly seven years, a developer threatened to boom Stehekin's size by almost 15 percent (HCN, 11/9/98: Even in the remote West, growth happens). Many of Stehekin's 100 residents worried that the planned condominium development was too big and intrusive.

The scale will remain small because in February, the National Park Service and the Conservation Fund, a national land preservation group, completed a $1 million deal to buy the land, preventing the construction of condos within the town's 459 acres.

"This is the best possible outcome we could have hoped for," says Ramos. She says the victory is proof of a grassroots effort that worked, and if necessary, "we can do it again."

The victory ends wrangling between the landowner and the Park Service over a possible land trade. Stehekin is a small pocket of private land surrounded by the 62,000 acre Lake Chelan National Recreation Area. Originally, developer William Stifter refused to accept cash for his land, saying he didn't want the federal government getting more land in the valley. Instead, Stifter wanted to trade for other public land in the area.

Conservationists say Stifter tried to force a lopsided exchange to put more land in private hands. Stehekin Alert, a coalition of local residents and environmentalists, objected to the Park Service trying to trade away land they say included sensitive wildlife habitat and wetlands. Following a flood of comments opposed to the swap, the agency pulled its land from the offer.

When the stalemate broke this winter, Stifter told the Seattle Times that he would accept cash instead of a land trade, because, after seven years, "I wanted closure."

"We just added 48 terabytes of updated aerial imagery for the entire continental United States. Starting today users will see the updated imagery at zoom levels 13-17 on Mapbox Satellite. The new imagery is beautiful -- and it's all made possible by open data from the USDA's National Agriculture Imagery Program.

Our image processing pipeline, built on top of Amazon Web Services' cloud infrastructure, ingested the 24 hard drives worth of orthoimagery and perform a series of image calibration and adjustment routines to produce a seamless mosaic basemap that is fast, accurate, and beautiful. We'll be going into more detail about the processing pipeline and how this relates to Satellite Live in a few days."

…

[includes]

"The Elwha Dam, on Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula, was demolished in 2011. What used to be its lake is turning into meadows and sandy riverbanks."

Students take on real-world challenges and, using a design process to develop solutions, actually work to implement them. Professionals from the community work with students in order to create an authentic learning experience as they dive deeply into science, engineering, mathematics, the arts and humanities and entrepreneurship — all fueled by radical collaboration with peers, the use of powerful technology and a deeply caring and devoted staff.

Coursework is strategically integrated to support meaningful learning all in preparation for college and career post high school goals. Many students will take advantage of college courses available through EWU's Running Start courses at Riverpoint Academy.

The focus at the Academy is on 21st century skills and leadership, STEM literacy and nurturing the creative passion within each student."

"Tui Tui is a member-nation of the International Council of Independent States, and is under the benevolent rule of Co-Tyees Dogfish and Dragonfly. The first stamps that KDPN printed for Tui Tui are the 1988 Year of Food series, shown on the right. These were printed with a Heidelberg platen press by letterpress process, as were the Occussi-Ambeno 20th birthday issue, and the Mevu 20th birthday set. The 1990 Penny Black set was printed using an English-made Adana press on white gloss art paper with shiny gum and perf 12."

"Now that a digital copy of the Library of Congress’s entire book collection could fit in a single shoebox, the future of the contemporary library is up for grabs. The New York Public Library’s proposed reconfiguration of its Manhattan headquarters is only the most recent high-visibility entrant in a debate that has been ongoing since the mid-1990s, manifested in the press and in a series of large urban central library projects in Berlin, Singapore, Seattle, and elsewhere. What should a contemporary library be? 1 Seattle is one oft-cited exemplar: there Rem Koolhaas and Joshua Prince-Ramus of the Office of Metropolitan Architecture jettisoned the reading rooms, study carrels, and hushed whispers of the traditional library in favor of a dramatic multi-story “living room” where patrons could, according to the architects, “eat, yell, or play chess.” But to find architects, librarians, and municipalities who have re-conceptualized the contemporary public library with a more nuanced and promising vision, we must turn our attentions away from noisy Seattle and other large projects toward the modest community library.

Around the globe, a handful of innovative architects are forging a new building type with a deceptively familiar name. These libraries offer something found nowhere else in the contemporary city: heavily used, not-for-profit communal spaces that facilitate many and various kinds of informal social interactions and private uses. Ranging in size from five thousand square feet, a smallish McMansion in Westchester, to thirty thousand square feet, the size of Derek Jeter’s home near Tampa, some of these community libraries are neighborhood branches of an urban library system, and others stand alone. These buildings look nothing like one another, yet they all offer exemplary moments of architectural innovation. Collectively, they make the case that excellent design is no luxury, certainly not for the civic buildings and lives of people and their communities."

…

"No wonder that, around the world, the construction of new small community libraries has spurred an impressive efflorescence of architectural innovation. People have wearied of bowling alone. Individuals need places where they can engage with others like and unlike them, with whom they share an affiliation just by virtue of inhabiting a particular city, town, or neighborhood. Groups of people need places that can help constitute them into and symbolically represent their community. Everyone needs what the urban sociologist Ray Oldenberg calls third places—the first is home, the second is school or workplace.2 That is what these new community libraries provide.

THE FUTURE OF THE LIBRARY IS UP FOR GRABS.

This creates an engagingly complex architectural challenge, as the community library presents many competing mandates that are difficult to resolve in built form. To become a lively centrifugal social force that can buttress or, in more troubled areas, constitute a neighborhood’s sense of identity, it must project the impression that it is a civic icon and a public place. And yet it must also offer people opportunities to engage in solitary pursuits. Today’s community library might well be a place where one can eat and play chess, but it must not be a place to yell; it must still offer private moments in communal places, moments saturated in silence, light, the knowledge and the creativity of human expression. And all on a tight budget.

How to distill such competing if not colliding imperatives—public, private; iconic, domestic; distinctive, local—into a coherent design? Even though technically all that a community library actually needs is enclosed, climate-controlled loft spaces, in fact it needs more. Only good design can make a mute, inert edifice convey to people that it embraces all comers and embodies their community’s shared identity. Many of the new library designs are loft-like spaces writ monumental, but they are much more than warehouses for computers, books, and people. Monumentalizing domesticity by design, they take their cues from the needs of people in general and community library patrons in particular: the neighborhood’s scale, the proportions of the human body, people’s innate receptivity to natural light, their tactile sensitivity and associative responsiveness to materials."

Billings Middle School is a dynamic academic community intentionally focused on the unique complexities of early adolescents. Our students become public-minded, critical thinkers impelled to actively engage their world.

GUIDING PRINCIPLES

These deeply held driving forces are qualities that determine our priorities and how we operate and communicate with each other. Our guiding principles help us measure the value and impact of our decisions.

1. We specialize in the unique complexities of early adolescents.
2. We provide a rigorous academic environment for a broad range of students that celebrates the acquisition and application of real world learning.
3. We foster a safe space for risk-taking, exploration, and the search for identity.
4. We inspire students into awareness, care, & advocacy of self and community.
5. We promote social justice and environmental sustainability.
6. We operate with transparent integrity.

SOCIAL JUSTICE AND GLOBAL SUSTAINABILITY

'Goals for sustainability must be guided by inquiry into socio cultural, environmental and economic perspectives; connected with respect for human identities, rights, needs and aspirations; and implemented through just, transparent and inclusive processes for decision-making.'
- 2009 UNESCO Conference on Education for Sustainable Development

Billings has a unique opportunity to model a lifelong commitment to promoting global sustainability because our students are beginning to consciously reconcile their emerging self-image with a broader sense of the world and their purpose within it.

• We see that the foundations for this work are built from within ourselves, and recognize that we live and operate in a society created and characterized by historical inequities of power.

• We believe that the work of seeing, engaging and disentangling institutionalized privilege is an act of social justice, a critical human endeavor, and a society-building skill necessary to thrive in the 21st century.

• We therefore strive at Billings to be an educational community characterized by its emphasis on fostering self-understanding, critical thinking and global awareness so as to promote equitable and ethical habits of living in the world.

• We commit ourselves to the pursuit of social justice in the establishment and evaluation of school governance, curriculum, disciplinary practices, educational programs, admissions, faculty performance and hiring. "

…

"EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY

Billings offers a rich core curriculum designed to engage students in rigorous, multi-faceted ways. Classes align with the developmental growth of our students and are taught with an awareness of each individual's strengths and learning styles. Everything at Billings, from the design of the overall program to one-on-one interactions, is guided by the four key concepts outlined below.
FOUR CORE ELEMENTS OF A BILLINGS EDUCATION

I. DESIGNING A DEVELOPMENTALLY RESPONSIVE CURRICULUM

The dynamically complex development of early adolescence guides all we do at Billings. Curriculum design is based on key questions about the intellectual and emotional maturity of each individual and their peers. The structure of our school day, our calendar and our trips equally reflects our understanding of growth cycles. Finally, all of our interactions with students are anchored in a profound belief that middle school students are exceptionally capable. Our expectations of students is high, because we know that in our environment they grow self-aware and gain the confidence to risk truly complex thought.

II. TEACHING INDEPENDENT, CRITICAL THINKING IN A CULTURE OF PUBLIC MINDEDNESS

We believe that the development of one’s identity is intricately linked to an emerging sense of humanity and ethics. We always ask the question, "What is the application of what we are learning?" "What is our impact?" It is our goal to go beyond "service learning" to the point of integration – a place where students intuitively consider power, perspective, bias, access, and sustainability as they carry out the work of their lives.

III. CREATING POWERFUL STUDENT ADVOCATES

Advocacy is comprised of three elements; self-understanding, confidence and engagement. From the moment they arrive at Billings, we challenge students to reflect on their identity and approaches to learning. We build on strengths and openly identify and work on challenges. In all we do, we seek to reinforce students' efforts to engage – to ask questions, adapt their environment, negotiate and seek out the support of mentors. As they progress through Billings, students become more confident, advocating for their beliefs as well as their own needs.

IV. MODELING LIFELONG LEARNING AND MENTORSHIP

Teachers at Billings first and foremost understand and appreciate early adolescents. They are characterized by their patience and sense of humor and, most of all, by an exceptional commitment to individual students. Teachers at Billings are renaissance people. They openly seek learning, through research, discussion or travel with a unique level of support from the school. As one recent graduate said, "Hardly anyone leaves Billings without a mentor, or without knowing how to get one!""

"With the dismantling of two dams on Washington state’s Elwha River, the world’s largest dam removal project is almost complete. Now, in one of the most extensive U.S. ecological restorations ever attempted, efforts are underway to revive one of the Pacific Northwest’s great salmon rivers."

"The Incluseum is a project based in Seattle, Washington seeking to encourage social inclusion in museums. It is facilitated and coordinated by Aletheia Wittman and Rose Paquet Kinsley. You can contact us at incluseum@gmail.com"

"In the end, the boycott of the winter round of the MAP primarily reflected the will of students and parents, who agreed with teachers that student time was better spent learning in the classroom, and that library computers were better used for student research and writing rather than testing. Had she acknowledged this, Michelle Rhee would have had some difficult questions to answer.

If students vote unanimously to boycott a test, is it still okay to put their demands and interests first, or does putting students first mean ignoring their democratic decision making?

If the parent organization at a school votes unanimously to support the teachers in boycotting a flawed test, is it okay for the parents to guide their children, or should students disregard their parents and instead follow an astro turf organization called “Students First”?

What happens when students, parents and teachers around the nation join together in common cause and protest for a meaningful education rather than the overuse of standardized tests? Is it okay to put “students first” when they agree with their teachers about what constitutes a quality education?

Rhee's inability to ask these critical thinking questions is a demonstration of the very cognitive problems that can arise from an over reliance on standardized testing."

…

"Moreover, Rhee has no understanding of the history of standardized testing or its contribution to the reproduction of inequality. As University of Washington education professor Wayne Au has written, “Looking back to its origins in the Eugenics moment, standardized testing provided…ideological cover for the social, economic and education inequalities the test themselves help maintain.” The stability of testing outcomes along racial lines, from the days of Eugenics until today, demonstrates standardized testing has always been a better measure of a student’s zip code than of aptitude. Wealthier and whiter districts score better on tests. These children have books in the home, parents with time to read to them, private tutoring, access to test-prep agencies, healthy food, health insurance, and similar advantages. Standardized testing has from the very beginning been a tool to rank and sort people, not to remove the barriers needed to achieve equality."

…

"The destination at which Seattle’s students, parents and teachers want to arrive is not on the MAP. Our desired destination is graduating students who demonstrate creativity, social responsibility, critical thinking, leadership, and civic courage. Seattle’s teachers are not afraid of assessment, but many of us know that to reach those goals, we will need to venture off the well-worn and narrow path of selecting from answer choices A, B, C, or D.

Michelle Rhee, I’m afraid you are lost. Come debate me in public, and I can help you find your way."

"Founded in early 2011 by photographer Klea McKenna and writer Nikki Grattan, In the Make is a collaboration that offers an intimate look at current art practice. Through visiting artists in their studios we learn about each artist’s space, process, influences, and the behind-the-scenes elements that are often unseen in a gallery or museum setting. We document these visits with the hope of revealing both the richness and the daily realities of creative work. Our aim is to raise interest in art practice, while simultaneously debunking the romantic myth of the artist. We recognize that creative work is real work, done by real, passionate people in all sorts of different spaces. We are not art critics, but rather deeply curious observers; looking for the ways that each artist’s aesthetic pervades their environment and reveals their perspective.

"The forces opposed to high-stakes assessment tests have their Montgomery, and it’s Snohomish.

When more than 550 sets of parents—about one out of 10—in this small town west of Seattle refused to let their children take the Washington State Measurements of Student Progress exam in April, they moved the anti-testing movement to a new phase of civil disobedience.

From two at an elementary school in Portland, Maine, to 550 in Snohomish, to 1,427 in Colorado, frustrated families that oppose the high-stakes tests required by the 11-year-old No Child Left Behind law are deploying a new weapon: keeping their kids from taking them."

"The proportion of Americans who say there’s too much emphasis on testing has nearly doubled, from 20 percent in 1997 to 37 percent today, according to a Gallup Poll conducted for Phi Delta Kappa International."

"Craft3 is a non-profit community development financial institution with a mission to strengthen economic, ecological and family resilience in Pacific Northwest communities. We do this by providing loans and assistance to entrepreneurs, non-profits, individuals and others who don’t normally have access to financing. We then complement these financial resources with our expertise, networks and other advocacy for our clients. Learn more about our business strategy.

"The Puget Sound River History Project studies the historical landscape of Puget Sound's lowland rivers and estuaries as a dynamically linked geophysical, ecological, and human system. The historical emphasis is on conditions at the time of earliest Euro-American settlement in the mid-19th century, but also includes the landscape's post-glacial, Holocene (10,000 yrs BP) evolution and the last century and a half of change. We undertake interdisciplinary research that integrates archival investigations, field studies, and the tools of geographic information systems and remote sensing. We also apply the results to, and make data available for, regional problems of resource management, restoration and planning."

"The Flat World Friedman at first advocated, & which he now treats like gravity—a force of nature outside our control—is a choice…a set of policies designed to benefit multinational corporations. Globalization is more politely refer to as free trade, which is where multinationals convince governments to drop trade barriers so that they—corporatists—are free to move their capital around & invest it in ways that amass the greatest amount in their hands. This means that in the US, corporations can avoid taxes, unions, environmental regulations, & active oppostion to their policies by locating manufacturing & other facilities in countries w/ lower pay & less controls.

Free trade has also come along w/ Devil’s bargain in the US, too, where states take on more the look-and-feel of third world nations by advertising themselves as ‘right to work’ states, which means that they have made union activities more difficult. Consider…Boeing planning to move jobs from WA to South Carolina."

"…student-run non-profit organization that aims to inspire students to learn more about science & technology by offering hands-on opportunities for students to explore beyond & experiment w/ concepts that were so laboriously covered in school textbooks.

Why? When learning how to ride a bike, the majority of people learned by trying over and over again until the skill has been mastered, not by reading a textbook, listening to a lecture, or watching an educational video. Thus, when learning about science & technology, students should be actually applying the knowledge they learn and asking more questions. Science is about inquiry.

…Much like there are libraries for people interested in reading, & sports fields for those interested in sports, we run a workspace in Bellevue where students can learn from our volunteers and classes as well as working on many cool projects…workspace is absolutely free…"

"Capitalist utopianism and unqualified loathing for all that remains of the welfare state are the dispositions that now unite the Republican Party from the bottom up. George Orwell wrote in The Road to Wigan Pier that while it might be too much to hope for economic equality, he liked the idea of a world where the richest man was only ten times richer than the poorest. Bertrand Russell in Freedom versus Organization wrote that since money is a form of power, a high degree of economic inequality is not compatible with political democracy. Those statements did not seem radical seventy years ago. Today no national politician would dare assent to either."

"Sarah Palin and other figures on the right like to talk about “small town values” as being “the real America.” We know better. These are our values:

We have great urban places, where people can live and shop in the same building. & we protect them. We’re proud of what we build…catch…brew…cook up. Seattleites create & use urban spaces – their way…We support local business…take care of each other – & feed each other. No car? We want to give you a safe, affordable ride. No yard? We’ve got a place for you to play. & organizations like Solid Ground help ensure everyone can enjoy it…We’re not scared of new ideas. We think idealism is a virtue…We stand up for each other…If you work hard & you play by rules, you’re a real American. & sometimes, it’s American to break the rules…We share our cultures with each other. And the music, the art, the food…is astounding…President Barack Obama called on America to win the future. Mr. President, the people of Seattle are ready."

"From December 2010 to January 2011, Brooklyn-based artist David Horvitz drove up the West Coast from Mexico to Oregon, stopping to take pictures of himself staring off into various vistas as a part of his latest project, Public Access. Horvitz took each of his images — a collection of pensively photobombed beaches, bridges, lighthouses, and creeks — and uploaded them to their proper Wikipedia pages, adding to and sometimes replacing the images already there."

"Driving on the Decline in the Pacific Northwest? Orphan Road offers a set of data showing that traffic volumes throughout the Northwest are declining, at least according to a local news source. Data show a reduction in traffic in Seattle and Portland, and statewide in Washington and Oregon. Earlier reports showed a decline in metro Seattle, but this is the first news we’ve seen pointing to a regional trend. And Orphan Road adds that in at least one case the decline precedes the 2008 recession or the rise in gas prices. Sightline Daily, which first reported the data, said it’s important that traffic engineers take note. “It may not make sense anymore — and might, in fact, be financially risky — for transportation planners to assume that demand for car travel will rise in the future the way it did in the 1950s.”"

"And so I realized that I had a responsibility to more than just me, and that I was going to have to change. You know, we can do it. I was going to have to change. And I was afraid to change, because I was so used to the guy who only just walked. I was so used to that person that I didn’t want to stop. I didn’t know who I would be if I changed. But I know I needed to. I know I needed to change, because it would be the only way that I could be here today. And I know that a lot of times we find ourselves in this wonderful place where we’ve gotten to, but there’s another place for us to go. And we kind of have to leave behind the security of who we’ve become, and go to the place of who we are becoming. And so, I want to encourage you to go to that next place, to let yourself out of any prison that you might find yourself in, as comfortable as it may be, because we have to do something now."

"The crucial point is that car infrastructure not only encourages driving, it also sabotages mobility by any other means. It’s a vicious cycle: roads beget sprawl begets car dependence begets roads, and so on. And the result is an ever-expanding built environment in which walking, biking, and transit are not viable options.

The only way to break the vicious cycle is to invest our limited transportation dollars in infrastructure that will help make walking, biking, and transit more attractive than driving. And here’s where we need to start being honest with ourselves: If we are serious about creating a city in which significant numbers of trips are made by modes other than cars, then we will have to accept that driving will become less convenient than it is today."

"We’ve all been told to buy locally, but...investing, we give our money to same old faceless Fortune 500 companies. If we could invest in the neighborhood bar or bike shop instead, that capital would stay in community. Unfortunately, securities law makes it practically impossible for small businesses to issue stock & accept investment.

"Re-Educate is looking to connect people in the Puget Sound area who believe the industrial model of school should be quietly laid to rest as we welcome a new kind of school for the 21st century. This blog is also designed to serve as a gathering place for people interested in helping organize Re-Educate 2012: a Collaborative Learning Event. For information, email steve@pscs.org."

"For most people, Sir-Mix-A-Lot is synonymous with his hit "Baby Got Back." But for his real fans, or fans of early hip-hop in general, the greatest song Mix ever did was "My Posse's On Broadway," an homage to my home neighborhood in Seattle. It's a detailed step-by-step trek with Mix and his posse as they hit up local landmarks like Dick's Burgers and generally have a good time.

It's a great, fun song, and Google Maps user Adam Cohn has done fans a favor by making a map of Seattle that details every stop along the way. This is one of the most fun things I've seen in Google Maps in a long time.

An image of the map is above, but for a more interactive version you can check out Cohn's map for yourself. To make it more fun, below is the video for the single so you can follow along while you follow along. Try not to get the song stuck in your head."